Overfishing Threatens Critical Link in the Food Chain - Earth Policy Institute

The fish near the bottom of the aquatic food chain are often overlooked, but they are vital to healthy oceans and estuaries. Collectively known as forage fish, these species—including sardines, anchovies, herrings, and shrimp-like crustaceans called krill—feed on plankton and become food themselves for larger fish, seabirds, and marine mammals.

Krill

Historically, people have eaten many of these fish, too, of course. But as demand for animal protein has soared over the last half-century, more and more forage fish have been caught to feed livestock and farmed fish instead of being eaten by people directly. A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that current fishing levels are dangerously high—both for the forage fish themselves and for the predators and industries that depend on them.

Found from the tropics to the poles, forage fish typically travel in dense schools of thousands or even millions of fish. While this is effective for guarding against ocean predators, it makes them easy prey for modern fishing fleets equipped with purse seine nets that can cinch up an entire school at once. What’s more, forage fish stocks are highly sensitive to environmental change and prone to population crashes, so fishing levels considered safe in good years can be disastrous in bad ones.

Many of the world’s largest fisheries focus on forage species, including Peruvian anchovy, Atlantic herring, and chub mackerel. Together, forage fish typically account for more than 30 percent of the 80 million tons of fish caught annually in the world’s oceans and estuaries. Roughly 9 of every 10 tons of forage fish hauled in are destined for the “reduction” factory, where they are cooked and pressed to extract the oil; what remains is then dried and milled into fishmeal, a high-protein brownish powder. About 6 million tons of fishmeal and 1 million tons of fish oil are produced each year. Nearly all of the fishmeal is fed to farmed fish, pigs, and poultry. The oil, high in omega-3 fatty acids that are prized for their health benefits, is a popular feed additive and is also used as a nutritional supplement for humans.

Notwithstanding their large contribution to the world fish catch, recent research suggests that forage fish are worth at least twice as much in the ocean as they are on the boat. In 2012 the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force, an international group of 13 distinguished marine and fisheries scientists, released the results of a three-year study in a report entitled Little Fish, Big Impact. The authors calculated that forage fish generate nearly $17 billion per year in reported catch—$5.6 billion for the small fish themselves and $11.3 billion in landings of the fish that eat them. This does not include the value of ecotourism for watching whales, which eat forage fish; the value of recreational sport fishing where forage fish are used as bait; or the important role of forage fish in keeping plankton under control.

Forage fish have a long history of being targeted for meal and oil. For example, Atlantic menhaden—herring and sardine relatives that migrate along the U.S. Atlantic coast—were first sent to processing factories in New England and the mid-Atlantic region in the mid-1800s to become fertilizer and a cheap substitute for whale oil, which was used in everything from leather tanning to cosmetics. Menhaden meal was later used in animal feed, beginning in the early 1900s. (Around that time, North Europeans started fishing Atlantic herring for the same purpose.) Still used mainly in feed but also in health supplements, Atlantic menhaden are one of the largest U.S. fisheries by weight today.

As more pork and poultry producers in the United States and Europe began using inexpensive fishmeal in feed rations, landings of forage fish grew. When the large-scale Peruvian anchovy fishery was launched in the 1950s and Peru and Chile began to aggressively exploit the productive waters along the western coast of South America, fishmeal use in feed began to spread worldwide. For decades now, the Peruvian anchovy has been not just the world’s largest source of fishmeal, but the world’s largest fishery overall, in some years topping 10 million tons. Peru alone has some 1,200 vessels supplying anchovy to 140 reduction factories, which produce meal and oil worth about $2 billion per year in exports.

While the Peruvian anchovy fishery is indeed lucrative, it is also, like many other forage fisheries, highly dependent on favorable environmental conditions. Especially during El Niño events, warm Pacific Ocean waters—sometimes with overfishing as an accomplice—have over the decades led to numerous anchovy population crashes and devastated harvests. In October 2012, Peru cut the allowed anchovy catch to its lowest level in 25 years after the fish’s population plummeted yet again, likely due to warmer ocean temperatures. With the anchovy supply thus restricted, the world price of fishmeal jumped to a record high by December. (See data.)

A half-century earlier, the young but already massive Peruvian anchovy fishery illustrated the ecological repercussions of heavy forage fishing. Unfavorably warm waters and an anchovy catch averaging 8 million tons per year depleted the food base for cormorants, gannets, and pelicans in the mid-1960s. Severe population declines among these birds ensued. Cormorants, almost entirely reliant on anchovies for food, saw an 89 percent drop from their historical average. Seabird populations in this ecosystem still have not recovered.

Worldwide, three quarters of the 72 marine ecosystems studied by the Lenfest Task Force contain predators dependent on forage fish for at least half their diet. Some predators, including the blue whale, Humboldt penguin, and yellowfin tuna, rely on forage fish for at least 75 percent of their diets. For these animals, plummeting prey populations can mean both impaired breeding and starvation.

The vast majority of the world’s forage fish stocks are either considered fully exploited, with no room for safely increasing the catch, or they are already overfished and in need of rebuilding. Given the climate sensitivity of forage fish and the key ecological role they play, the Lenfest authors recommend that, in general, catches should be half their current levels.

Reducing demand for fishmeal and oil will largely depend on the aquaculture sector. Twenty-five years ago, pigs and poultry accounted for 80 percent of world fishmeal consumption. By 2000, this share had dropped to 60 percent. But over the next decade, aquaculture production doubled, fishmeal prices rose nearly four-fold, and pig and poultry producers rapidly replaced fishmeal in feed with soybean meal. Today 68 percent of fishmeal goes to fish farms, as does 74 percent of fish oil.

There are some encouraging signs on this front, however. For example, nearly every major type of farmed fish—from salmon to carp—has seen significant reductions in the fishmeal content of feed since the mid-1990s as proteins from plants (particularly soybeans) and livestock and poultry byproducts have increasingly become suitable alternatives. Between 1995 and 2007, the fishmeal content in shrimp feed dropped from 28 percent to 18 percent. The drop was even more dramatic for salmon, from 45 percent to 24 percent. The recent surge in fishmeal prices is forcing even more feed switching.

There has also been a rise in the use of seafood industry byproducts in fish feed. In 2010, one third of fishmeal production came from fish trimmings and other food fish production wastes. On the other hand, finding substitutes for fish oil rich in omega-3s has been more difficult and may prove a bigger obstacle to lowering the forage fish catch in line with scientific advice.

Some scientists and chefs have promoted greater consumption of forage fish directly as food, noting that this is much more efficient—and more accessible to poorer consumers—than eating them indirectly through farm-raised salmon or shrimp. Forage fish already provide an important protein source in many low-income countries around the world, especially in coastal Africa. In fact, they account for over half the supply of food fish in 36 countries, including the Maldives, the Philippines, and Ghana. And direct consumption is on the rise in some countries. For example, Peruvians ate 190,000 tons of anchovies in 2010—19 times as much as in 2006. More

 

China’s Rising Soybean Consumption Reshaping Western Agriculture

Global demand for soybeans has soared in recent decades, with China leading the race. Nearly 60 percent of all soybeans entering international trade today go to China, making it far and away the world’s largest importer.

The soybean was domesticated some 3,000 years ago by farmers in eastern China. But it wasn’t until well after World War II that the crop gained agricultural prominence, enabling it to join wheat, rice, and corn as one of the world’s four leading crops.

This rise in the demand for soybeans reflected the discovery by animal nutritionists that combining 1 part soybean meal with 4 parts grain, usually corn, in feed rations would sharply boost the efficiency with which livestock and poultry converted grain into animal protein. As China’s appetite for meat, milk, and eggs has soared, so too has its use of soybean meal. And since nearly half the world’s pigs are in China, the lion’s share of soy use is in pig feed. Its fast-growing poultry industry is also dependent on soybean meal. In addition, China now uses large quantities of soy in feed for farmed fish.

Four numbers tell the story of the explosive growth of soybean consumption in China. In 1995, China was producing 14 million tons of soybeans and it was consuming 14 million tons. In 2011, it was still producing 14 million tons of soybeans—but it was consuming 70 million tons, meaning that 56 million tons had to be imported.

China’s neglect of soybean production reflects a political decision made in Beijing in 1995 to focus on being self-sufficient in grain. For the Chinese people, many of them survivors of the Great Famine of 1959–61, this was paramount. They did not want to be dependent on the outside world for their food staples. By strongly supporting grain production with generous subsidies and essentially ignoring soybean production, China increased its grain harvest rapidly while its soybean harvest languished. More

 

Study: Global crop production shows some signs of stagnating

After decades of rapidly growing global agricultural output, production of four of the world’s most important crops could be stagnating or even slowing in some regions, according to a new study published in Nature, a top scientific journal.

The study, by the University of Minnesota’s Deepak Ray and four others, examined millions of census reports from the last half century to gather their data.

The authors are careful to point out that crop production is still increasing in parts of the world; it is by no means a categorical decline. The report’s abstract reads summarizes, “Although yields continue to increase in many areas, we find that across 24–39% of maize-, rice-, wheat- and soybean-growing areas, yields either never improve, stagnate or collapse.” That’s about a quarter to a third of global production of four of our most important crops.

This is potentially a very big deal. World populations are still growing. So is the global middle class, members of which tend to consume more meat and dairy per person, which means more crops per person. That’s been happening for a while, and it’s been fine as long as food production has kept pace. But the pace of crop production growth appears to be slowing in some really important regions, particularly in parts of India and China – and, yes, the U.S.

How did this happen? Study co-author Jonathan Foley, talking to Science Daily, suggests one possible explanation. “This finding is particularly troubling because it suggests that we have preferentially focused our crop improvement efforts on feeding animals and cars, as we have largely ignored investments in wheat and rice, crops that feed people and are the basis of food security in much of the world,” he said. Yikes. More

 

Curbing Tanzania’s “Land Grabbing Race”

DAR ES SALAAM, Dec 19 2012 (IPS) – From January 2013, Tanzania will start restricting the size of land that single large-scale foreign and local investors can “lease” for agricultural use. The decision follows both local and international criticism that major investors are grabbing large chunks of land here, often displacing small-scale farmers and local communities.

The Permanent Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office Peniel Lyimo confirmed that the government would limit the amount of land leased to investors in this East African nation. Previously, there were no limits.

“For a large-scale investor who wants to invest in sugar, the ceiling has been put at 10,000 hectares. (The limit for) rice is 5,000 hectares. The ceiling for sugar is significantly higher due to the fact that it may also produce electric power,” Lyimo told IPS. Sugarcane fibre is used in the generation of electricity.

According to official documents, seen by IPS, from the Tanzania Investment Centre, a government agency set up to promote and facilitate investment: “Even within a seven-year period, an investor would not be able to use more than 10,000 hectares…”

The move will come as a relief to land rights organisations that have continually called for the government to curb the land grabs here. [related_articles]

In 2008 the Tanzanian government launched the Kilimo Kwanza (Agriculture First) initiative in order to increase private sector investments in agriculture.

And when the World Economic Forum took place in Dar es Salaam in 2010, the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT), a multi-stakeholder partnership to rapidly develop the country’s agricultural potential, was formed and the government began to invite foreign companies to invest in crops like sugarcane, maize, rice and cassava.

However, civil society organisations like the Tanzanian NGO Land Rights Research and Resources Institute (LARRRI) and the Oakland Institute, an independent policy think tank in the United States, called on the government to review its investment policy to limit the amount of land given to foreign investors.

“Giving tens of thousands of hectares to large-scale investors was hurting small-scale farmers,” said LARRRI executive director Yefred Myenzi.

To date, he told IPS, the government has given 80,000 hectares of land to large-scale investors.

“Land conflicts pitting poor villagers against powerful investors now number more than 1,000 reported incidents. On average, there are five land disputes daily in the country and three of these involve powerful investors,” said Myenzi.

In Tanzania’s northern Loliondo district, which is known for its wildlife, much of the land has been leased out to international hunting concessions, which has resulted in the large-scale eviction of the local population – although the government refutes this. A major U.S. energy company, AgriSol Energy, has also been accused of engaging in land grabs in Tanzania that would displace more than 160,000 Burundian refugees, according to a report by the Oakland Institute. The report states that AgriSol is benefiting from the forcible eviction of the refugees, many of whom are subsistence farmers, and leasing the land — as much as 800,000 acres — from the Tanzanian government for 25 cents per acre.

Myenzi said that of the 1,825 general land disputes reported in 2011, 1,095 involved powerful investors. More

 

Grabbing at Solutions: Water for the Hungry First

This piece is part of Water Grabbers: A Global Rush on Freshwater, a special National Geographic News series on how grabbing land—and water—from poor people, desperate governments, and future generations threatens global food security, environmental sustainability, and local cultures

A spontaneous, largely under-the-radar blue revolution is gaining steam in sub-Saharan Africa and has the potential to boost food security and incomes for tens of millions of the region’s poorest inhabitants.


Small-scale irrigation techniques with simple buckets, affordable pumps, drip lines, and other equipment are enabling farm families to weather dry seasons, raise yields, diversify their crops, and lift themselves out of poverty.

But unless African governments and foreign interests lend support to these farmer-driven initiatives, rather than undermine them through land and water deals that benefit large-scale, commercial schemes, the best opportunity in decades for societal advancement in the region will be squandered.



Worldwide, as the limits of available water become ever more apparent, the rush is on to acquire more of the precious liquid before there’s none to be had. Government and business interests from China, India, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and other countries that have depleted many of their own water sources are now acquiring access to the land and water of other nations – especially poor ones – to rake in profits and secure food supplies.



The 2008 spike in global food prices unleashed a frenzy of land and water deals that threaten not only the livelihoods of millions but also the geopolitical security of nations.



Nowhere is this more evident than in Africa, especially poor countries south of the Sahara. Business and government interests are targeting Ethiopia, Mali, Sudan, and other underdeveloped nations to capitalize on their “underutilized” farmlands and waters.



Although pitched as investments to advance economic development, many of these deals are not only failing to deliver promised benefits, they are destroying the livelihoods of traditional farmers, herders, and fisherfolk.



Today, hunger is endemic in sub-Saharan Africa. The 2012 Global Hunger Index ranks forty-two of the forty-five countries in the region for which data are available at “serious” or “alarming” levels. Nearly one in four children are underweight. More

 

How will climate change impact on fresh water security?

Fresh water is crucial to human society – not just for drinking, but also for farming, washing and many other activities. It is expected to become increasingly scarce in the future, and this is partly due to climate change.

Understanding the problem of fresh water scarcity begins by considering the distribution of water on the planet. Approximately 98% of our water is salty and only 2% is fresh. Of that 2%, almost 70% is snow and ice, 30% is groundwater, less than 0.5% is surface water (lakes, rivers, etc) and less than 0.05% is in the atmosphere. Climate change has several effects on these proportions on a global scale. The main one is that warming causes polar ice to melt into the sea, which turns fresh water into sea water, although this has little direct effect on water supply.

Another effect of warming is to increase the amount of water that the atmosphere can hold, which in turn can lead to more and heavier rainfall when the air cools. Although more rainfall can add to fresh water resources, heavier rainfall leads to more rapid movement of water from the atmosphere back to the oceans, reducing our ability to store and use it. Warmer air also means that snowfall is replaced by rainfall and evaporation rates tend to increase. Yet another impact of higher temperatures is the melting of inland glaciers. This will increase water supply to rivers and lakes in the short to medium term, but this will cease once these glaciers have melted. In the sub-tropics, climate change is likely to lead to reduced rainfall in what are already dry regions. The overall effect is an intensification of the water cycle that causes more extreme floods and droughts globally.

When planning future water supplies, however, the global picture is less important than the effect of warming on fresh water availability in individual regions and in individual seasons. This is a much more complicated thing to predict than global trends. The IPCC technical report on climate change and water concludes that, despite global increases in rainfall, many dry regions including the Mediterranean and southern Africa will suffer badly from reduced rainfall and increased evaporation. As a result, the IPCC special report on climate change adaptation estimates that around one billion people in dry regions may face increasing water scarcity.

However, the degree to which this will happen cannot be predicted with confidence by current models. In many regions different models cannot even agree on whether the climate will become wetter or drier. For example, a recent study of future flows in the River Thames at Kingston shows a possible 11% increase over the next 80 years relative to the last 60 years. However, under an identical emissions scenario, the same report shows an alternative projection of a 7% decrease in flows.

Especially little is known about future declines in regional groundwater resources because of lack of research on this topic, even though around 50% of global domestic water supply comes from groundwater. Although scientists are making progress in reducing uncertainty about fresh water scarcity, these kinds of unknowns mean that water supply strategies must be adaptable so that they can be effective under different scenarios.

The direct impact of climate change is not the only reason to be concerned about future fresh water scarcity – a fact highlighted by a recent United Nations Environment Programme report. The increasing global population means more demand for agriculture, greater use of water for irrigation and more water pollution. In parallel, rising affluence in some countries means a larger number of people living water-intensive lifestyles, including watering of gardens, cleaning cars and using washing machines and dishwashers. Rapidly developing economies also result in more industry and in many cases this comes without modern technology for water saving and pollution control. Therefore concerns about climate change must be viewed alongside management of pollution and demand for water.

The most common solution to increasing demand, and a way of insuring against possible climate change impacts, is the engineered redistribution of freshwater over space and time: reservoirs to store it, pipelines to transfer it, and desalination to recover freshwater from the oceans. Efforts are also being made to increase water saving, reuse and recycling, and in the UK there is currently major investment into education and water-saving technology by the government and water industry. More

 

DJIBOUTI: Rising food insecurity fuels migration

BALBALA, 27 November 2012 (IRIN) - Successive years of poor rains have eroded the coping mechanisms of pastoralists in Djibouti’s rural regions, even as high food prices and unemployment rates afflict the country’s urban areas. These factors are increasing the vulnerability to food insecurity and spurring migration.

Checking for malnutrition in Balbala

The area of Balbala, about 12km outside of Djibouti City, has become home to families fleeing both harsh conditions in the countryside and dwindling livelihood opportunities in the city.

“What we need most is food”

Awale Farah, 65, migrated with his family of seven from the rural Ali Sabieh area, near the southern town of Dikhil, to Balbala three months ago. Dikhil lies along the border with Ethiopia and has a large number of migrants, complicating access to scarce basic resources there.

Farah says that back in Ali Sabieh, residents are moving closer to the Ali Addeh refugee camp, hoping to obtain some of the assistance meant for the camp’s 16,778 refugees. “I don’t know how they are getting along. What we need most is food,” he said.

At present, about 70,000 people in rural Djibouti are food insecure. More than 60 percent of household food supply is being met by food assistance in the northwest pastoral zone, according to an October-to-March 2013 food security outlook by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET).

In the southeast pastoral border area, “households are marginally able to meet minimum food needs only through accelerated depletion of livelihood assets and adoption of unsustainable coping strategies such as charcoal sales,” the outlook says.

The areas most affected by hunger include Obock in the north, Dikhil and Balbala. According to 2010 figures, 42.9 percent of the children in Obock showed signs of wasting. In 2006, Djibouti ranked second in the world for prevalence of wasting in children under five, at 21 percent.

But life in Balbala is not easy, either. “The situation here is very hard. Sometimes we get money from family members in town,” Farah said. “In Dikhil, at least we had livestock that would always provide us with food.” Even so, many pastoralists have lost their livestock to the successive droughts.

Today, I left at 4am to go and look for work and came back home with nothing. There are days when we eat nothing

To cope, Farah has split up his family - two of his children are staying with relatives in Djibouti City.

Unemployment and high prices

Meanwhile, a lack of jobs is causing city residents to migrate to peri-urban areas such as Balbala.

Abdillahi Djama Abdiguedi’s family moved to Balbala from Gagada, an area closer to the city where rent cost them 5,000 Djibouti francs (about US$28.20) per month.

“Here, we pay nothing,” he said. “Most of the people around here moved from the city.”

Abdiguedi works as a casual labourer every morning, heading to town to search for work at construction sites. “Today, I left at 4am to go and look for work and came back home with nothing. There are days when we eat nothing,” he said. “The children have forgotten what milk is." More

 

 

Taking Stock: World Fish Catch Falls to 90 Million Tons in 2012

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that the world’s wild fish harvest will fall to 90 million tons in 2012, down 2 percent from 2011. This is close to 4 percent below the all-time peak haul of nearly 94 million tons in 1996.

The wild fish catch per person has dropped even more dramatically, from 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds) per person at its height in 1988 to 13 kilograms in 2012—a 37-year low. While wild fish harvests have flattened out during this time, the output from fish farming has soared from 24 million tons in the mid-1990s to a projected 67 million tons in 2012.

Over the last several decades, as demand for fish and shellfish for food, feed, and other products rose dramatically, fishing operations have used increasingly sophisticated technologies—such as on-vessel refrigeration and processing facilities, spotter planes, and GPS satellites. Industrial fishing fleets initially targeted the northern hemisphere’s coastal fish stocks, then as stocks were depleted they expanded progressively southward on average close to one degree of latitude annually since 1950. The fastest expansion was during the 1980s and early 1990s. Thereafter, the only frontiers remaining were the high seas, the hard-to-reach waters near Antarctica and in the Arctic, and the depths of the oceans.

The escalating pursuit of fish—now with gross revenue exceeding $80 billion per year—has had heavy ecological consequences, including the alteration of marine food webs via a massive reduction in the populations of larger, longer-lived predatory fish such as tunas, cods, and marlins. Unselective fishing gear, including longlines and bottom-scraping trawls, kill large numbers of non-target animals like sea turtles, sharks, and corals.

As of 2009, some 57 percent of the oceanic fish stocks evaluated by FAO are “fully exploited,” with harvest levels at or near what fisheries scientists call maximum sustainable yield (MSY). If we think of a fish stock as a savings account, fishing at MSY is theoretically similar to withdrawing only the accrued interest, avoiding dipping into the principal.

Some 30 percent of stocks are “overexploited”—they have been fished beyond MSY and require strong management intervention in order to rebuild. The share of stocks in this category has tripled since the mid-1970s. A well-known example of this is the Newfoundland cod fishery that collapsed in the early 1990s and has yet to recover.

This leaves just 13 percent of oceanic fish stocks in the “non-fully exploited” category, down from 40 percent in 1974. Unfortunately, these remaining stocks tend to have very limited potential for safely increasing the catch.

These FAO figures describe 395 fisheries that account for some 70 percent of the global catch. Included are the small minority that have undergone the time-consuming and expensive process of formal scientific stock assessment, with the remainder being "unassessed" fisheries. There are thousands more unassessed fisheries, however, that are absent from the FAO analysis. In a 2012 Science article, Christopher Costello and colleagues published the first attempt to characterize all of the world’s unassessed fisheries. The authors report that 64 percent of them were overexploited as of 2009.

The top 10 fished species represent roughly one quarter of the world catch. Nearly all of the stocks of these species are considered fully exploited (most of these fish have more than one geographically distinct stock), including both of the major stocks of Peruvian anchovy, the world's leading wild-caught fish. Stocks that are overexploited and in need of rebuilding include largehead hairtail—a ribbon-like predator caught mainly by Chinese ships—in its main fishing grounds in the Northwest Pacific. (See data.)

Despite the unsustainable nature of current harvest levels, countries continue to subsidize fishing fleets in ways that encourage even higher catches. Governments around the world spend an estimated $16 billion annually on increasing fleet size and fish-catching ability, including $4 billion for fuel subsidies. Industrial countries spend some $10 billion of that total. More than $2 billion is spent by China, whose 15-million-ton catch is nearly triple that of the next closest country, Indonesia. More

 

Full Planet, Empty Plates: Quick Facts

With falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures making it difficult to feed growing populations, control of arable land and water resources is moving to center stage in the global struggle for food security. What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity and food nationalism? Here are a few of the many facts from the book to consider:

 

• There will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night—many of them with empty plates.
• As a result of chronic hunger, 48 percent of all children in India are undersized, underweight, and likely to have IQs that are on average 10-15 points lower than those of well-nourished children.
• Food prices are rising dramatically. The U.N. Food Price Index in June 2012 was twice the base level of 2002-04.
• More than half the world’s people live in countries where water tables are falling as aquifers are being depleted.
• A startling 80 percent of oceanic fisheries are being fished at or beyond their sustainable yield.
• Between 2005 and 2011, the amount of grain used to produce fuel for cars in the United States climbed from 41 million to 127 million tons—nearly a third of the U.S. grain harvest.
• In 2011, China consumed 70 million tons of soybeans, 56 million of which had to be imported. Almost all went into livestock feed.
• Today, with incomes rising fast in emerging economies, there are at least 3 billion people moving up the food chain, consuming more grain-intensive livestock and poultry products.
• Data for India indicate that 175 million people are being fed with grain produced by overpumping. For China, there are 130 million in the same boat.
• In Ethiopia, a prime target for foreign land acquisitions yet also a major food aid recipient, an acre of land can be leased for less than $1 per year.
• The 464 land acquisitions identified by the World Bank in 2010 totaled some 140 million acres—more than is planted in corn and wheat combined in the United States.
• It’s not all bad news: 44 countries have reached population stability as a result of gradual fertility decline over the last several generations.

“In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage. Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold.” – Lester R. Brown

 

 

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity is available for purchase online. Get a sneak peek by checking out Chapter 1: Food the Weak Link or watch the five minute video below and hear from Lester Brown himself about the main issues raised in the book.

 

 

 

Recalibrating Food Production in the Developing World: Global Warming Will Change More Than Just the Climate

Recalibrating Food Production in the Developing World: Global Warming Will Change More Than Just the Climate - Author: Thornton, P

Abstract: An analysis of the effects of climate change on 22 critical agricultural commodities and three important natural resources in the developing world reveals a number of cross-cutting themes: The world’s agricultural systems face an uphill struggle in feeding a projected nine to ten billion people by 2050. Climate change introduces a significant hurdle in this struggle.

- Securing and maintaining necessary levels of calories, protein and nutrients for populations around the world will be an exceptional challenge.

- Recalibrating agriculture in the face of climate change is more than planting crops that can tolerate warmer weather. Some commodities, for example, can grow in warm weather but cannot resist the insects and diseases whose prevalence will increase. Others can tolerate

a lack of water but not the sporadic flooding that occurs with more common weather extremes.

- Even as global deforestation continues, trees continue to be valued as a provider of agricultural commodities like nuts and fruit; as a mitigating resource that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; and also as a staple of adaptation—trees help stabilize soil erosion, better regulate water, as well as provide shade, firewood and fodder.

- Production of the most common commodity staples—wheat, maize and rice—will be challenged by new weather patterns. Adjustments in production, replacement with commodities that can tolerate the new conditions in different regions, and innovations in technology are key elements of adaptation.

- Raising livestock and catching fish and other aquatic products—two of the more common sources of protein—will also be challenged by a new climate. In some areas, different plants, breeds and species can provide substitutions, but in others, adaptation is critical.

- This recalibration of agriculture will eventually extend beyond what is grown and raised. The world’s many cultures must adapt to the changing dinner menu forced upon them due to climate change.

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